I used to work on IRC. I was involved with Atheme. I poured my blood, sweat, and tears into IRC. And at the end of the day, it’s going nowhere fast. It’s dead. You can argue this point with me all you want. I don’t care, for general use, it’s dead.
Matrix is a moderation and technical disaster and is extremely brittle (I’ve had the homeserver I use blow up twice).
XMPP is a shit protocol (streaming XML… really?), and requires your server and client implement multiple XEP’s to be useful… but then you’re playing a game of “does my client AND server support this useful XEP?” That game is extremely unfun to play. I’ve administered an XMPP server. I gave up. And I know of like one XMPP MUC I’ve ever seriously used, in my nearly two decades of using XMPP. This is on top of all the clients for XMPP being utter garbage.
All the other FOSS chat solutions are designed for very specific workflows and not useful for general use.
There really is no good answer to chat in the FOSS space, so guess what I use the most? Telegram and Discord.
I resisted for years. I pushed back. I gave in a few years ago. Know why? Because FOSS devs don’t give a shit about making something useful for everybody. At least Discord and Telegram mostly do.
Before you come into my @’s suggesting I use this or that: I probably already have, and I can say with certainty it sucks for general use. I do more than just talk about fucking tech shit online.
Before you come into my @’s saying IRC isn’t dead: it’s fucking dead. In 2016, I surveyed the ENTIRE IPv4 address space for IRC servers, ran /stats, and collected it. 500,000 people used IRC. And obviously I didn’t filter for uniqueness because how could I? The landscape is likely no better now than it was then, since this was before *gestures vaguely at FreeNode*.
Before you come into my @’s pimping Matrix: I use Matrix. It fucking sucks. I hate it. I’ve had to move homeservers twice due to it blowing up, in 5 years. It’s fucking brittle. And REST for chat… what kind of MADNESS is this???
Believe me, if there was a FOSS solution to chat that didn’t suck? I’d be using it.
@Elizafox yeah I have been and still am using Matrix, and between everything else I kind of feel like it's the least awful shot still, but the protocol in general and Synapse in specific is absolutely awful. I like the idea of bridging, and so far I'm still sort of using it, but I'm also a tech loving masochist and I am fully convinced no sane person would use this by choice.
@jonas @Elizafox usability is something #DeltaChat devs say drives their design. Does that not work for you?
Lets not quibble about wire protocols in a world where Cisco Jabber had good uptake in its target markets, and Google Chat and Whatsapp supposedly were/are basically closed-off #XMPP Chat over e-mail is #OK
